Page 160 - Culture Society and the Media

150 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
1955; Gieber, 1956) did attempt to highlight some of the organizational
constraints on media production, within a framework which could broadly be
described as that of functional or systems analysis, although this framework was
more frequently implicit in the research design than expressed as an explicit
theoretical formulation. From this early work emerged the concept of the
‘gatekeeper’—the powerful and often overtly prejudiced ‘Mr Gates’ who selects,
processes and organizes the information to be made available to an audience
which is—by implication at least—passive and unsuspecting. Subjected to
numerous refinements since its first appearance in the work of David White in
1950, the gatekeeper concept is still prominent. It remains, however, essentially
narrow in its treatment of communicators whom it casts as agents for system
maintenance and control:

Processes of ‘gatekeeping’ in mass communication may be viewed within
a framework of a total social system, made up of a series of subsystems
whose primary concerns include the control of information in the interest of
gaining other social ends. (Donahue et al., 1972, p. 42)

The problems of functional or social systems analysis need not be detailed here.
It is perhaps sufficient to note that its limited ability, in theoretical terms, to
account for conflict and its causes, change, individual purpose, the relationship
between organizations and social structure has, when applied to the study of
mass communicators, resulted in very restricted conceptualizations of the
context in which media output is produced.
Other theoretical perspectives can be seen to underly some of the more recent
studies of media organizations and occupations, though again these theories
more often exist at an implicit than at an explicit level. There is the liberal-
pluralist view, which sees media and media practitioners as autonomous,
responsible institutions and individuals (for example, Seymour-Ure, 1968;
Blumler, 1969). This contrasts with class-based or Marxist analyses which view
the media as inextricable from society’s dominant institutions and ideologies,
and see media output as an articulation and legitimation of the controlling interests
in those institutions and ideologies (for example, Hall, 1977; Murdock and
Golding, 1977; elements of this approach can also be traced in less explicitly
political contexts in, for example, Elliott, 1972; Glasgow University Media
Group, 1976). Yet it seems that neither the liberal-pluralist nor the Marxist
perspective has so far been really successful in moving from theoretical
formulation to empirical validation (q.v. Bennett for an analysis of some of the
problems involved in ‘operationalizing’ theory). Moreover, both Richard
Hoggart—in Glasgow University Media Group (1976)—and Michael Tracey
(1978) have argued that each of these perspectives obscures the complexities of
the internal and external relations of media production.
A further approach, in fact that adopted by Tracey (1978) in his study of the
production of political television in Britain, derives from a paradigm for the